5 Ways to Get Your Health Back on Track
Published on Jul 5, 2019. Updated on Mar 21, 2023.
Osmosis Health Coach, Ishan Dahal, shares some insights on maintaining your health and well being with 5 simple tips that you can implement today.
Ishan Dahal is our Osmosis Health Coach and founder of Himalayan Health, a company dedicated to enhancing the health and well-being of individuals and companies. Ishan believes that over time, small behavior modifications can result in long-lasting changes and that healthy individuals lead to healthy communities. At Osmosis, we firmly believe that clinicians who practice self-care are in the best position to care for their own patients. So, we asked Ishan for suggestions to get your health back on track. Get yourself started with these 5 tips!
Tip 1: Automate it
What body part to train? Should I do cardio? What kind of cardio? These are just some of the questions that can come up before going to the gym. All this can lead to decision fatigue. The result—the gym becomes a mental battle. A simple way to get past this is to automate the decision. What I like to do is take 30 minutes at the start of the week and write down how many days I can workout and what I plan to do for one week. Now I have a plan for the week. I can easily repeat this for a few months. If I get bored of the routine, I will take another 30 minutes and create another template and on and on it goes.
If you want to get even more efficient, you can write down the exercises you plan to do and bring it along with you to the gym. With all the applications that are available these days it is almost effortless to bring our plan with us. The template is your GPS. You now have a turn by turn direction on where you need to go. This minimizes decision fatigue and mental drain that can precede minutes before the trip to the gym.
Tip 2: Call an audible
This is going to be somewhat opposite to what we talked about above. Following the same routine all the time can be boring. Some of us like to keep things interesting, this is where calling an audible can be helpful. Call an audible is a sports term where after analyzing the situation the person in charge makes a move that they deem appropriate. We can do the same. Instead of waiting for our workout time to arrive or every Monday is leg day, so I have to do legs, we can call an audible and go for a jog, take the kids to the park, or any other activity we feel like doing at that moment.
Another instance this can be helpful is when we are having a stressful day at work. We can call an audible and go for a walk outside for 15-20 minutes. Outdoor walks have shown to be a great way to enhance our well-being.
Tip 3: Take advantage of loss aversion
I hate losing. I may own something I don't really want, but I do not want to get rid of it. It just doesn’t feel good inside. This makes me someone who tries to avoid loss, or loss aversion. If you are anything like me, we can take advantage of this. We can hire a trainer and if we do not utilize the services, the money spent on the trainer disappears.
Another way to go about it is to make a pact with a friend by giving them a few hundred dollars (the sum has to be significant enough to cause loss aversion) and set parameters. If we do not go to the gym for a designated amount of days, the friend will donate the money to a charity. This can be a powerful tool that can help us do things that we do not particularly enjoy, but it is good for us.
Tip 4: Quasi Meal-prep
As soon as I hear the word meal-prep, the picture that comes to mind is 25 individual tupperware filled with 10 lbs of chicken breast, 5 bags of broccoli, and big bag of brown rice. I would not blame you at all from turning the other way at the idea. I used to do that at one point, but I have modified my process significantly. Breakfast is fairly quick to make and I am home in time to prepare dinner so the only meal I really need to worry about is lunch.
You might have a different predicament, so you’ll need to adjust accordingly. Just by realistically analyzing my meal situation I simplified my meal prep process. I only need to worry about 5 meals. If I make 2 salads for lunch, then I only need to prepare 3 meals. Salads can definitely be made the day before without much hassle. I call this approach quasi meal-prep. This is still meal preparation but we are filling the essential gaps. Fruits, yogurts, snack-able veggies, nuts, etc. can also cut down the meal preparation significantly.
Tip 5: Own it, be it and live it
The tools we discussed above are simple ways to achieve healthy living. None of it is going to work, however, if we are not committed to owning it, being it, and living it. Living a healthy lifestyle should not be something that we do a few months out of the year, it should be perennial. It would not be a fair exchange if all the progress we have achieved comes to us at the cost of our health. Being healthy and living a healthy lifestyle is not a huge undertaking.
Lean physique with bulging muscles and washboard abs in not the definition of healthy living, contrary to what the popular sources might have us believe. It can simply be maintaining a comfortable body-weight, eating whole foods 80-90% of the time and engaging in some sort of physical activity—activity that requires some level of exertion—regularly. I do not think this is asking a whole lot from us.
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